Tag: woodwork

I have lost count of the times I have forget to turn on the workshop vacuum cleaner before turning on dust making wood working equipment. Recently I decided that I needed to compensate for my distraction with an automatic Smart Switch. However, all the switches find either did not do what I wanted or were way beyond my budget. So I decided to make my own.

Like this:

Sanding machines are common in most woodworking shops. I have thought about getting a disc sander for my garage/workshop but I don’t have the space for a dedicated machine and – never having owned one – am not sure how much use it would get, making it doubly hard to justify.

Recently I was looking at my lathe and the penny dropped that this is a horizontal motor to which you can attach stuff that rotates. I had the basis of the disc sander staring me in the face.

Like this:

Anyone who uses a CNC machine eventually realizes the importance of the Zero point. This usually happens when something goes wrong during a machining cycle, the machine needs to be reset and the current zero is lost. Fruitlessly searching for a lost zero prompted me to develop a repeatable process for finding the same zero time after time. Here’s how I do it.